The Wizard at Mecq

by Rick Shelley

  Silvas sat on a bale of hay. Unlike the ordinary horses in the rest of the stable, Bay could be trusted not to gorge himself on fodder left within reach.

  "I wonder if it is not more resignation than fear," Silvas said. "Fear is the common lot of peasants, especially on the marches where warring armies might come through burning and killing at any time."

  "That kind of resignation is but fear carried on too long for the edge to remain," Bay said. "It is still fear. They bar their doors at night, sleep clutching crucifixes and rosaries, and wake with a quick Hail Mary at any sound. Judgment Day would surprise no one in Mecq."

  "It's more than the water," Silvas said.

  "Much more," Bay agreed.

  "Even the vicar may not realize it."

  "You heard about the rider?" Bay asked.

  "Carillia told me."

  "The vicar must have some sense of the danger, even if he can't name it, or he'd not be so quick to send for news of us," Bay said.

  "Perhaps. But he probably won't discuss this feeling with me until he decides that I'm not the threat. Or until his bishop replies."

  The two were silent for a moment. Bay paced back and forth a couple of times, then stopped near the door. The top half was open to give him fresh air. Silvas remained seated.

  "Have you decided how to give Mecq its water?" Bay asked finally.

  "I haven't thought hard on it yet," Silvas replied. "Water should be easy, if not for the threat from Blethye. It would be a hollow victory for Mecq if the duke came in as soon as we left and overturned our work."

  "Blethye has grown uncommon strong of late," Bay observed. "One might wonder at that."

  "How has he grown strong?"

  "A question that may need answering before long," Bay said. The conversation lapsed into silence. Silvas sat with Bay until Bosc came in. Then he got up, stretched, and wished both horse and groom a good night.

  Silvas stopped in the center of the courtyard, senses reaching out to the sentries above the gate and on the walls, feeling for any hint of alarm—and finding none. Then the wizard looked straight up, bending his head back. The sky was ablaze with the points of stars, a rash of lights across the heavens.

  "A few drops of rain from each of you," Silvas whispered. "But I doubt you have even the scant water Mecq husbands." He had tried to look closely at a star once, when he was still an apprentice new to the gift of telesight. He had focused and reached out toward the brightest star in the night... and had nearly had the eyes burned out of his head for his rashness. The ball of raging fire had nearly consumed him. Only the quick intervention of Auroreus had saved him. "Some visions even the gods are denied, lad," Auroreus said after tending the young Silvas's injuries. "I should have warned you about this." There had been none of the shouting that Silvas had expected.

  "Someday," Silvas whispered, scanning the sky. "Someday." Memory of his burns returned. He would not challenge the fires of heaven yet.

  —|—

  Carillia was pacing the length of the small sitting room that adjoined their bedchamber, hesitating each time she passed one of the room's two windows to look out into the night. She wore only a light robe of silk now, so fine that it was nearly transparent. Her brows were knitted in an uncommon expression of deep concentration or worry. She hardly seemed to notice Silvas's arrival, and that in itself was evidence of great agitation.

  "What bothers you so, my love?" Silvas asked, not attempting to disguise his astonishment. Carillia stopped pacing and faced him.

  "I don't know," she said, and the music of her voice was oddly discordant, with almost a tangible anguish. She took a deep breath. Silvas watched as she carefully banished all signs of her concern. When she spoke again, her voice was calm, her face showed no hint of bother.

  "Ah, my heart." She moved to Silvas and took his hands in hers. "It's just a fancy that came over me. Likely it's no more than a reaction to what you told our people at supper."

  Silvas didn't believe that any more than Carillia did, but he didn't question her explanation. It would serve for the moment. Velvet and Satin came out of the bedroom, and Silvas could see that even the cats looked less serene than usual.

  "Morning will come as always, my love," Silvas said. He drew Carillia into his arms and kissed her lightly. She relaxed, softening in his grip. Then Velvet and Satin were with them, and the cats were looking for attention as well. They needed a lot of stroking before they would settle down in front of the bedroom door so Silvas and Carillia could enter.

  The soft lights of the night came in through the bedroom window. The darkness was only partial, even after Silvas extinguished the last of the candles. The wizard and his lady required little more light than the cats in order to see.

  Silvas undressed, setting the belt with his dagger on a stand at the head of the bed. Carillia dropped the robe from her shoulders. For a moment she stood silhouetted against the window. Silvas and Carillia moved toward each other and met in the center of the bed. They moved smoothly from soft kisses and light caresses through to the harder passions of their love. Mecq disappeared from their thoughts in the regular renewal of their pillow vows. The light of climax, when it came, was nearly as bright as the star Silvas had once tried to look into... but this light was without pain.

  Afterward, as Silvas and Carillia snuggled together to slide into sleep, Velvet and Satin pawed their way quietly into the bedroom to take up their usual positions at either side of the bed. Sleep was another soft caress in the dark, a peace that moved outside time into eternity... and ended with the frantic screams of the cats.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The sudden shrieks from Velvet and Satin brought Silvas and Carillia out of sleep immediately. The first cry of the cats had hardly begun before Silvas sprang up out of sleep, instantly alert, already rolling toward the side of the bed and starting his response.

  "Eyru, reygu mavith. Eyru, sprath tourn." The first spell of defense was out of his mouth as he started to move. The walls of the bedchamber developed a soft luminescence, a pale silvery glow that would silhouette any foe of flesh or spirit that might intrude while it shielded the beings who belonged in the Glade from the eyes of outsiders.

  Silvas quickly pulled on a robe and buckled his knife belt around him, automatic reactions. He ran toward the door and reached out with his mind to gauge the nature of the assault. He had no doubt that the alarm meant an attack. Satin and Velvet ran ahead of Silvas, and Carillia was at his heels. At the door Silvas grabbed a seven-foot quarterstaff. The staff, with a ferrule of silver at one end and one of iron at the other, was useful in certain magics, and it was also handy for dealing with physical enemies.

  On the run, Velvet and Satin quit caterwauling. The humans behind them were much slower, but the cats paused at every corner to look ahead and to wait. They knew where to go. They led the way up to Silvas's conjuring room without instruction. The silvery luminescence was brighter there. The cold white glow of the walls was bright enough to read by. The crystal pentagram in the floor gleamed like icy fire.

  Silvas plunged straight to the center of the pentagram, and his arrival there increased the light in the room. His incantations increased as he cast his mind out, his searching thoughts chasing away like ripples in a pond as he sought the source of the alarm and broadened the protective shield around him, and around the Glade. Silvas could sense his soldiers hurrying to their posts. They might have little strength against magic, but sorcerers and demons often came in the company of physical warriors.

  Carillia and the cats had steered their way around the pentagram. Even the cats knew that they did not belong within its lines at a time like this. Like Carillia, Satin and Velvet went to protected neutral zones near the walls, into crystal circles laid into the floor like the lines of the pentagram. Unlike the white glow of the pentagram, the circles glowed a light pink. There was a series of these rings around the room. Carillia went to one. The cats moved to circles at either side of her. The animals sat back on their haunc
hes, claws extended, eyes fixed in intense feline concentration, staring past the edges of the pentagram in the center of the room.

  When the screams of the cats wakened her, Carillia hadn't stopped even to put on a robe. She stood naked in her circle, body tensed, leaning slightly forward as if ready to leap at an attacker or meet his charge. Her lips moved quickly as she uttered silent chants of her own. The look on her face was one of single-minded intensity. She stood as ready to defend herself as Silvas and the cats did, and nothing about her suggested any doubt about her ability.

  Outside, the thunder started with a soft rumble and grew louder as it pulsed for many seconds before the first bolt of lightning streaked past the window, so close that it seemed certain that it must have actually struck the Glade. More lightning came. The thunder continued to echo off itself. Heavy rain pelted the wall and came in through the glassless window. The lightning and thunder were no mere spectacle. The storm surrounded the Seven Towers, but even so, it served more as a frame to what happened inside. The glow within the conjuring room faded and pulsed with each shock. Another lightning bolt struck close to the keep. Its report was so loud that it momentarily drowned out the sounds of Silvas's chanting and the renewed screams of the cats.

  The brimstone smell of the lightning found its way into the conjuring chamber with a strength that was almost overpowering—too strong, too intense to be only physical. The lights in the room flared and then seemed to reverse themselves: the silvery glow became an inky black luminescence, providing pale silhouettes against the dark glow. But there was no loss of vision for Silvas and his companions.

  "It comes," Silvas said.

  Renewed thunder covered his words, but Carillia and the cats either heard him anyway or got the message in more direct fashion. The cats bared their teeth. They no longer bothered to scream their alerts. Now they hissed a warning for whatever was coming.

  The storm outside ended—or at least it was blocked from the awareness of those inside the conjuring chamber. The danger was closer now, and much greater than that of lightning.

  Silvas raised his staff in both hands, parallel to the floor, chest high, and extended it toward the window. Flickers of light and dark flowed through the window and filled the room, the light bleaker but more intense than lightning. Unaided eyes could never hope to adapt to the strobing of blinding light and eternal blackness that came and went in cycles much faster than the eye could blink. Motion seemed stopped by the rapid alternation of light and dark. Thunder rolled continuously, no longer connected to individual flashes of lightning. It grumbled from the depths, then crescendoed into a deafening roar, with the next wave building over the dying echoes of the last.

  Sparkling outlines of demonic figures appeared within the room as burning lines that seemed to mute the storm in the chamber without really lessening its fury. The bodies and faces of the demons became more visible during the dark. The flashes of light could not obliterate their forms, though. A smell of rotten eggs and burning rock built within the chamber. Terror flowed from the figures, a visible effluence, and a new sound of ethereal laughter, intimidating enough to make the soul quaver.

  Silvas faced the two demons squarely while he chanted continuously in the language of power. He wove his shields and attempted to weave nets to capture the illusive figures that dared to challenge him in his own lair. Each attempt to snare the demons failed, though, and sparked new peals of their horrible laughter.

  "You feeble mouse. Your nets cannot touch us," one of the demons screamed. Each word was ringed with scorn and echoed with laughter. The faces of the two demons broadened and grew, becoming larger than the bodies. The mouths gaped open to show razor-sharp fangs and gullets full of the fires of hell. Heat flowed out and over Silvas, singeing the hair on his arms.

  Despite the heat pouring over his face and arms, Silvas felt ice grip at his feet, locking them in place. A chill breeze blew up under his robe at his command, a shrinking, tightening wind. He touched the iron end of his staff to one intersection of the pentagram, and cold fire flared up, momentarily overriding the strobing of light and dark that had ushered in the demons, chilling the fires they breathed, freezing the flames like the steam of breath on a cold morning. The demons' laughter faded with the blaze and returned as that cold glare died away and the flickering regained its dominance.

  The demons either came closer to the pentagram or grew larger again. Their outlined figures made it impossible for Silvas to judge which. He increased the pace and volume of his chants. The walls of the chamber seemed to fade and disappear, no longer competing with the flashing that supported the manifestations of the demons. Silvas found himself standing on what appeared to be a mountain peak that towered so far above the rest of the world that nothing else was visible. He stood on a small flat area that protruded into infinity. He was barely aware of the presence of Carillia and the cats.

  The duel consumed him.

  Silvas focused the lines of force that rose from his pentagram. The only constant now was the pattern of glowing crystal around his feet. The lines were clear, bold. The planes of force that rose from them shaded into ultraviolet, beyond the vision of anyone without the magic to see them. In the center of the pattern, Silvas remained conscious of himself and of the long staff in his hands. The quarterstaff was almost part of him now, a bar joining his hands.

  Pain reached fiery fingers into his brain, pulling and twisting, stretching his mind out of shape. His body seemed ready to evaporate beneath his tortured head. He heard Bay neigh loudly, a battle challenge, not a cry of fright. For an instant Silvas could see the giant horse rearing in the stable, front hoofs pawing at the dark, caught up in some duel of his own. Bosc was at Bay's side. The little groom had knives in both hands, and the thin blades had an icy glow of their own.

  That image disappeared but not permanently. It kept flickering back, part of the general strobing that continued to surround Silvas. But he could not see the enemy that Bay and Bosc faced.

  More visions flashed in to seize Silvas, forcing themselves on him. He saw himself staked out on the ground, tiny insects by the million marching in columns onto his body. Each bug took a single bite of his flesh and marched off the other side. Mote by mote he was being consumed, a meal that would last for an eternity.

  Off to the side, Silvas saw a new image of himself appear as the first faded into the dark. Knives raked his body, digging deeper with each pass, turning thin scratches into deep channels of purple blood that flowed and ebbed in tides of their own, growing into sea waves of impossible dimension, drowning him in his own blood, pulling him under.

  Silvas felt himself being drawn forward, pulled from the center of his pentagram toward the lacerated vision of his body. The ice around his feet started to crack, stabbing his ankles. He fought the pull, reaching within to focus his chants and energy more tightly. He forced the images of the two demons to reappear, and with them in sight he could hold his position.

  The demons came back larger or closer once more. There was detail to them now, dimension. Their horns curved forward, black and sparkling. The teeth in their gaping mouths were long wedge-shaped daggers. In place of the earlier fire, black and purple blood welled up in their throats and overflowed, dripping from their swollen lips. Their laughter was even more grotesque than before, gurgling through the blood. It folded itself around Silvas, pressed in on him.

  Once more Silvas dropped the iron ferrule of his staff to an intersection of the pentagram. This time he didn't just hold it to bring light back to the confrontation. He went down on one knee, his hands sliding along the shaft as he lunged, dipping the silver ferrule toward the demon that seemed to be closer. When the silver of the staff touched the ghostly outline of the demon, bright yellow fire flamed and the demon's laughter turned, for an instant, into a scream of agony. The demon withdrew and Silvas stood again, bringing his staff back up.

  "Eyri, reyqi mavith," Silvas shouted, turning the tense of his spell. "Eyri, sprith cyclane." He t
urned the nightmares that showed him being eaten or sliced to bits and threw them back at the demons, reversing the time flow to show him being reassembled. For a moment more the demons seemed to retreat before his counterattack, but not for long.

  Silvas saw himself again, a larger than life figure hurtling toward him. Black claws ripped at his face, reached into his mouth, down his throat. Demon claws pulled him inside out. Bloody innards dripped and flopped as they were hauled out of his mouth. Fires licked at the inverted mess that was supposed to be him.

  The wizard felt his body tremble. The clash of power around him was peaking. He had to focus so tightly on his chants that he had little attention to spare for the well-being of his body. This has to end soon, he thought.

  A warm breeze started to circle the pentagram, almost too soft to detect at first, hovering at the edge of sensation. More images came and went around Silvas, distracting him long enough that he stumbled and had to scramble to keep from falling.

  He saw Carillia and the cats still within their protective circles, but isolated—their circles now cylindrical prison cells. The cats were tense, poised, still ready to spring at any physical enemies who dared to approach. Carillia looked just as intense, as feral as the cats, almost as if she too were ready to leap at any enemy who came within reach. The look on her face was of fury and bloodlust. No trace of her native beauty showed through the battle face.

  Silvas saw Bay's front hoofs strike out again. This time they hit some target that remained invisible to the wizard. Bright sparks flowed from the contact. Then Bosc pounced on another invisible foe. His knives flashed up and down. The blood that spurted out was all too visible.

  Silvas took a deep breath, concentrating as fully on that as he did on his spells. He felt the ice form around his feet again, protecting him, reaching up his naked legs to knees and thighs. The warm wind around the pentagram grew in strength and speed. It started to whisper its presence.